Eager-to-Please Perrotin

Though the spotlight generally shines on the most pop-oriented and media-friendly artists of the bunch, like Murakami and KAWS, Perrotin’s roster of 40 artists also includes conceptualists (Michael Sailstorfer and Sophie Calle). Perrotin, who is completely self-taught, acknowledges that his eclecticism is more instinctive than intellectual. But if there’s a lack of coherence to his stable, he insists it works to his advantage. “My program creates bridges between very different artists,” he says. “When a gallery’s artists are all a kind of ‘total look,’ they are all competing against each other.”

These days, of course, Perrotin’s instinct for making contemporary art simultaneously hipper and more democratic—something that initially had him labeled as a lightweight in Paris—has proved visionary, as elite museums and institutions adopt a more crowd-friendly approach. […]

Not long ago, Perrotin confessed to Murakami that he sometimes fantasizes about retiring. When I ask him why, he cites the pressures of his schedule, which has been particularly frenzied lately. He’s also going through a difficult split with Patricia Kamp, the mother of his 2-year-old daughter, and he recently got hit with a tax audit—his sixth. Is someone in the French government out to get him? “No, this happens because I’m the gallery that declares the most sales in France,” Perrotin says. Then he adds pointedly, “You understand what I mean.” (He doesn’t claim to be the biggest French gallery, only that he reports more income than the others.) […] As for the mauvaises langues who criticize Galerie Perrotin for being too trend-driven and sales-oriented, [Pierre] Soulages notes drily that the whole point of a gallery, after all, is to sell works of art. “When a gallery like Perrotin’s succeeds, it’s criticized as ‘commercial,’ ” Soulages says. “Unsuccessful galleries—well, they are less commercial, that’s for sure.”